By John Cherian (Frontline)
Rodrigo Buendia/AFP
President Rafael Correa after his re-election, on April 26.
The leftward swing in Latin America is being further consolidated. The avowedly socialist President Rafael Correa of Ecuador again won an emphatic victory at the polls in the last week of April. The other Latin American countries to have elected leftist governments are El Salvador, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Argentina, Honduras, Guatemala and Brazil. It is the first time in many decades that a President has been re-elected for a second consecutive term in office in Ecuador.
Before Correa came on the scene, the tumultuous politics of the country had witnessed as many as seven Presidents come and go in the past decade. Correa became the first President to win re-election since 1972. “We have made history in a country where from 1996 to 2006 no democratic government completed its term,” Correa told his cheering supporters after the election results were out. The squandering of the country’s bountiful natural resources by a greedy elite had alienated the masses from the political system. Correa, a vociferous critic of neoliberalism, refused in his short first term in office to repay part of the country’s huge debt owed to international financial institutions. Ecuador has defaulted on 32 per cent of its $10.1 billion debt.
Correa severed Ecuador’s relations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2007, describing the organisation as “exploitative”. In November last year, Correa decided to stop the payment of $4 billion in foreign debt after the country’s independent public debt audit commission concluded that the debt was illegally contracted when authoritarian governments were in control.
The Ecuadorian President said at the time that the IMF imposed conditions on developing countries while giving loans that benefited bankers and private businessmen at the expense of the poor. Correa has offered to buy Ecuador’s debt back at 30 cents to a dollar. He also imposed tough protectionist measures to safeguard the country’s economy, which was reeling because of the drastic fall in petroleum prices in the global market. At the same time, he tripled state spending on education and health care and doubled the monthly payment for single mothers. In his two years as President, half the budget has been devoted to the social sector.
In September last year, Correa got the country’s Constitution amended to give the government more powers to implement its socialist projects and to ensure that the proceeds from the sale of hydrocarbon deposits go to the exchequer. The government gets 40 per cent of its budget from the petroleum industry. Correa once said that the oil multinationals took four out of five barrels they produced and left only one for the country. The new Constitution gives the President control over the central bank, and allows a President to serve two consecutive four-year terms.
The 2008 Constitution guarantees free education through university. The document is considered one of the most progressive of its kind in the world. It guarantees the rights of the indigenous people, legalises the rights of gay people to a civil union and has strong provisions to protect the environment.
Rodrigo Buendia/AFP
Voters outside a polling station in Cangahua. The 2008 Constitution guarantees the rights of the indigenous people.
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Ecuador expelled two U.S. diplomats from the country earlier in the year for their “unacceptable meddling” in the internal affairs of the country. Ecuador has established cordial diplomatic and trade links with countries such as Iran. Ecuador signed a big defence deal with Iran after the raid by Colombian forces into its territory last year. It has begun to diversify its sourcing of defence hardware. Now it buys hardware from countries such as Russia, China and also India. It has placed orders for Indian-made Advanced Light Helicopters.
Correa has been viewed with increasing suspicion after he announced late last year that the lease on the U.S. military base in Manta was not being extended. At the beginning of his first term, he said that the U.S. could retain the Manta base if the Ecuadorian military was given a base in the U.S. State of Florida. Washington thought that Correa was only posturing. But the U.S. has been ordered to vacate the Manta base by the end of the year.
Manta is considered the most important American military base in the region, but Ecuadorians consider the presence of American troops on their soil a threat to their sovereignty and security. Correa had pledged to close the base after he first took office in 2007. Last year, Correa dismissed his Defence Minister along with the commanders of the air force and the army. He said at the time that the country’s defence establishment was “totally infiltrated and subjugated to the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency]”.
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